“You haven’t even read her book,” my partner deadpanned, calling me out for shamelessly parroting someone else’s thoughts on Goffman. “How do you know she doesn’t have something worth saying about those communities just because she’s white?”

(What a smart guy, right?)

Discerning reader, you read this and probably thought something like, “Oh, she tried that whole thing.”

What’s that “thing” you know I was trying to do, but are short on words for?

***

“Privilege” can be a helpful term to describe systemic socioeconomic advantages that make life easier for some than others. It can help us identify what justice looks like, and what it doesn’t look like. I’ll be the first to admit, though: its ubiquity seems to make it easy and safe to use, almost without thinking. It’s what my philosopher colleague Brian Earp would call a “mental shortcut” that stops conversation as often as it advances it.

Using the P-word tells people that you’re self-aware and socially conscious. It’s a nugget of social and moral capital. Performing social criticalness can exculpate you as a participant in oppressive systems. That’s the “thing” I was doing: allowing my own intellectual and civic insecurities to swamp an otherwise important conversation about seeking justice for disadvantaged communities.

Conversations about race and representation come with a lot of historical and emotional baggage in US. It’s destabilizing to enter a conversation where the stakes are higher than simply risking a foot-in-mouth moment. If you unintentionally say the wrong thing, you could end up on the wrong side of history, so a lot of us end up over-correcting.

Much like when you’re driving and jerk the wheel to avoid swerving off the road, we can over-correct in conversations by turning the wheel in the right direction, but a little too hard. We render meaningful words, like “privilege” and “lived experience,” meaningless when we use them to secure standing in a conversation, as opposed to when we use them to keep the conversation on track.

Much like “privilege,” the phrase “lived experience” appears everywhere in conversations about social justice, but it can also function as an ill-defined trump card. Writer James Walker suggested, “In the present age, ‘experience’ is both what is beyond reproach and the embodiment of the sacred, defined succinctly by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus as ‘that which cannot be laughed at.’”

Arguably, present deference to experience is a form of backlash against the historical reduction of diverse groups into damaging stereotypes. Just think of the minstrel show-style stereotypes that shaped the character of Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

However, “lived experience” can also be used as an over-correction. Writer George Packer observed how this happened recently in a review of a book on the musician James Brown. The review suggested the book was successful because the author, as a black man, knew what was important to recognize about James Brown, as a black musician. Packer took issue with the claim that black writers have “penetrating insights and varieties of context that are otherwise lost to nonblack music aficionados, no matter how broad the appeal of the music under scrutiny.”

The problem with this logic, Packer argued, is that it doesn’t escape the trap of reducing racial identity into a set of essential experiences. Thinking this way doesn’t allow for us to imagine the diverse complexity of experiences that make up black lives in America. He explained that the proposition in reverse would be clearly offensive and wrong:

Mozart can be fully appreciated only by people of European background. You can take the most sophisticated, gifted, industrious nonwhite critic — sorry, he or she is just going to miss some crucial things (‘penetrating insights and varieties of context’) for not having been born into the racial lineage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its cultural prerogatives, its particular refinements.

To come full circle, I basically admitted at the beginning of this essay that I’m an occasionally tone-deaf liberal: I don’t always hear my words getting off track. We all over-correct and misspeak, though. I would hate this essay to be misread as yet another on how liberals are just as dogmatic as conservatives. That’s a blame game we’d all do well to escape. Instead of focusing on real issues, like justice for disadvantaged groups, that’s a conversation being had among an elite intelligentsia diverting time and resources to righteously silencing one another.

What if we spoke and listened more carefully instead of silencing each other? I took a hard look at myself and saw this: I wasn’t thinking before I spoke, or listening to the real and imagined meanings of words. How often does this stop us from sustaining dialogue and effecting social transformations?

I now disagree with, but understand, the former me who said only disadvantaged black men should write about disadvantaged black men. I was getting caught up in a rhetorical performance, without considering, “Does ‘privilege’ mean ‘bad’?” Sure, unacknowledged privilege isn’t a good thing, but merely existing in the world, as I do, with socioeconomic advantages isn’t a bad thing in and of itself.

I don’t have the inside scoop on whether Alice Goffman exoticized the account she gave of those communities in Philly to dramatize their drug use or poverty. I do know, though, that her skin color and privileges don’t automatically preclude the possibility that she could have written a book based on trusting relationships, an empathetic one and reflects the complexity of her interlocutors’ experiences.

Whether liberal or conservative, all political philosophies have a vocabulary of their own. In conversations about social justice, it’s easy to parrot meaningful words, like “privilege,” to present ourselves as progressive. But we might want to pause and consider whether our language serves a purpose beyond a self-interested performance.

Chelsea Jack is a Masters student in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her writings for popular and academic audiences can be found on her Academia.edu page. Follow her on Twitter @chelseaajack.

4 Comments

The funniest thing I encounter in this range is how feminists “explain” manliness, explain men’s nature, and lives. How in the world do they know the “lived, embodied, whatever” experience of being a man? Adding the assumption that men are more “privileged” than women, men would probably be more educated, and have more leisure to contemplate manliness. One may counter that men are corrupted, self-interested and dishonest. But how exactly are feminists exempt from that, a group that makes their own interests central and makes its tenets a matter of faith and heresy? Going “women just know”, is hardly a guarantee for quality thinking. Naturally this is backfiring, as women have “discovered” that some of them are less privileged than others. And since its the essential feature of “woman” to be oppressed, those who are most oppressed (for whatever reason — except black men), “just know best”. Hilariously, this is epistemological privilege. Way to go, redistribution.

1, By the way, has speaking “instead” of disadvantaged group X been described as “cultural appropriation/intellectual appropriation/usurpation of voice/denigration of emotional labor (suffering)” yet?

2. “I would hate this essay to be misread as yet another on how liberals are just as dogmatic as conservatives. That’s a blame game we’d all do well to escape. Instead of focusing on real issues, like justice for disadvantaged groups, that’s a conversation being had among an elite intelligentsia diverting time and resources to righteously silencing one another.”

There’s a book called In Praise of Blame. It’s pretty poor. — But the point is, blame makes sense. It asigns responsibility. If you want to use resources responsibly, asigning responsibility makes a whole lot of sense. What you seem to want to say is “let’s stop being dogmatic and instead do good things”. The problem here is that people who don’t think that they are being (unduly) dogmatic won’t feel that this pertains to them. They will remain self-righteous.

Use of the word “privilege” by a white person is often a means of what social psychologists call “virtue signaling”. I metaphorically compare it to the way a submissive wolf might roll onto its back and bare its throat.

Having just entered academia after a career in the corporate sector, I see the word “privilege” thrown around a lot. In my view, it’s almost come to be a reverse form of racism, and those to whom it’s applied are too afraid to object because they don’t want to be seen as racist. Virtue signalling, again.

Rather than being obsessed with the word, I’d be more concerned with the attitudes that may lie beneath the surface. Often the word signals that the person using it adheres to the leftist ideology of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which I believe works to undermine good racial relationships. In fact, this idea of “racial relationships” is harmful…relationships should be between people, not races. Seeing everything in racial terms is one of the problems with CRT and will never lead to the sort of world we want to live in.

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